Dwight Scales

Football

The trampoline champion in Little Rock, Ark., found – literally – a bigger stage. He and some of his young pals learned of an Olympic-size trampoline on the stage in Philander Smith College’s gym, so they found their way into the building. Then, to assure easy access for later play, they unlocked a bathroom window they could climb in from the outside.

One afternoon when the gym was locked, they clambered through the window. They were bouncing about when a stern, pipe-smoking coach appeared in the doorway. They ran. So did he. Big trouble.

A few weeks later, the trampoline champ’s mother Linnie, a widow raising four children alone since the death of her husband in an automobile accident while serving abroad in the military, told her kids she had met a gentleman who would be escorting her on a date.

Any guesses who that gentleman might be?

Six months later, Linnie and the coach were married. The coach quickly reassured the trampoline champion that his misdeeds would be kept secret. Duane Gordon soon took a coaching job at Mississippi Valley State, then became the head basketball coach at Alabama A&M in 1968. That’s where the sporting life of Dwight Scales, his trampoline expertise notwithstanding, really began, leading to All-America recognition at Grambling State, eight years in the National Football League and this enshrinement into the Huntsville-Madison County Athletic Hall of Fame.

“It's a shelter, you know, well organized,” Scales says of the A&M landscape then. “I'm around professional, educated people, extremely athletic. And so I’ve got this venue, and I've got this surrounding in this environment that I'm growing up in. I was getting all the extra, I was getting all the things -- and Condredge (Holloway) was there too.” He was surrounded also by a team of siblings, Jerry (who’d also play college ball at Grambling), June, Julia and Duane Jr.

It was with Holloway that Scales wrote the first lines of his Hall of Fame resume. Scales – “Bo” to his pals back then – was a wide receiver at Lee. “We were doing a run-and-shoot offense with Coach (Keith) Wilson, and we just clicked,” Scales says. Holloway was a year older and signed with Tennessee. Scales had thoughts of going to UT as well, but Doug Porter, his godfather and one of Gordon’s best friends, was an assistant at Grambling. “At that time, there was no cable, and Grambling had their own national television program on Sunday night where they’d play the games back. Tennessee didn't have that, and so I chose to go to Grambling.” That worked out nicely for both sides. With future NFLer Sammie White lined up at the opposite end, Grambling won the Black National Championship in 1972 and 1975. Scales was All-SWAC in 1973-74-75, and named by Jet Magazine to its Black All-America team in 1975. Scales had 77 receptions and 29 touchdowns at Grambling, and was named to the school’s athletic hall of fame in 2021.

The Los Angeles Rams selected Scales in the fifth round of the 1976 NFL draft. He spent three seasons with the Rams, joined the Giants in 1979, then went to San Diego for three years before wrapping up his career in Seattle.

Following his retirement, he worked as an assistant coach at Alabama A&M and was head coach at Morehouse College for one season before moving to Austin, Tex., with wife Carla, whom he met – or, in his word, “stalked” -- at Grambling, and daughter Aseante, a psychoanalyst in New York, and sons Dwight Jr., a museum manager in Austin, and Joshua, a professional trainer and kick-boxer. Though he had not been a track athlete, he became involved in youth track in Austin, founding the Central Texas Elite Track Club, which launched more than 100 athletes toward college scholarships.

As he enters the Huntsville Hall of Fame, he considers this something of a “family reunion,” joining old friends, mentors and teammates like Holloway, Wilson, Brawnski Towns, Mike Wilbourn, Fred Carodine and John Stallworth, the Pro Football Hall of Famer. Stallworth was playing at A&M when the two became friends, and such was the influence and assistance from Stallworth, Scales would occasionally stroll into Lee High wearing some stylish hand-me-downs from Stallworth’s closet, and he even wore a pair of Stallworth’s old shoulder pads into the early days of his NFL career.

--Mark McCarter